The man behind the modern railway revolution in Manchester has revealed how his latest triumph - the new Victoria Station - has been a labour of love.

Architect Peter Jenkins is also leading the Northern Hub plans for the Piccadilly and Oxford Road stations - as well as the Ordsall Chord.

His mission is to boost capacity to allow more people to enter and pass through Manchester city centre.

But for Peter, the job is also personal - after growing up in Rochdale and being a regular at Victoria.

He said: “As a teenager I’d come down to Manchester from Rochdale and into Victoria station before they built the arena. It was a pretty dingy station to use. It was tatty, with old roofs.

“As I was growing up I knew the reputation of the station was pretty poor, and as I was training to be an architect it became something that was always on my mind.”

So it could be called fate that the architect director at Building Design Partnership in the city centre has been at the helm of its £44m transformation.

New-look Victoria Station

His team has also won the bidding war to design - public inquiry pending - the Oxford Road station expansion, Piccadilly’s revamp and the £85m Ordsall Chord, currently subject to a legal challenge.

The Ordsall Chord - subject to a public enquiry in April - is aimed at unblocking the congested city centre and giving direct access to the airport from Rochdale, Halifax and Bradford by December 2016.

And it means he is a central figure in making Network Rail’s Northern Hub a reality.

Heralded as the biggest investment in Manchester’s railways since the Victorian era, the £600m project is aimed at freeing up the region’s heavily-congested rail network .

It’s geared to allow 700 extra trains to run every day by 2019, boosting yearly passenger capacity by 44m, bringing £4bn to the region’s economy, along with up to 30,000 jobs.

It includes the now-complete £20m fourth platform at Manchester Airport and the £40m scheme to electrify the lines between Manchester, Liverpool, Preston and Blackpool by 2016.

Combined with electrification, it takes total investment to more than £1bn.

Peter added: “The Northern Hub does a lot of complicated things with tracks and rails and wires but there’s little point making those changes if you can’t get the people through.

New-look Victoria Station

“If you can’t get off the trains and into the right environment there’s no point. That means Victoria and Oxford Road need to get bigger.

“Victoria in particular will take some of the over-loading off Piccadilly station, it means a lot of the services that go there today will come through Victoria instead, taking the pressure off Piccadilly but also enabling Piccadilly to get bigger as well – the two things start to work together.”

On a more immediate level, doubling passenger capacity is also boosting the number of people with easy access the north of Manchester city centre.

“That means more restaurants, more office buildings - and more people living around Victoria and the other stations,” said Peter.

Mr Railway’s tour of Manchester’s Northern Hub

Victoria Station

Video Loading

Video Unavailable

Click to playTap to play

The video will start in 8Cancel

Play now

Victoria’s transformation will allow the passenger flow through its walls to increase from 20,000 to 40,000 a day. Peter and his team at BDP won a competitive bidding process to win Network Rails’ Victoria project - charged with ridding the hub of its 2009 ‘worst station’ tag.

The first Victoria Station was built in 1844, and then developed over seven or eight phases up to 1909.

The arena was built in 1995. Its staggered construction resulted in a jumbled station, helping it win the dubious ‘Worst Station’ tag in 2013.

Peter said: “We’ve had to unpick some of the problems that caused to make it work as it hopefully does today, particularly for the benefits of the hub and Second City Crossing.

“That was critical to the way we wanted to make changes to the station.”

He added: “We obviously wanted to create a really nice building but also something sustainable that will last into the future, take more passengers on trains and be able to take extra tram stops.”

Metrolink tram leaving Manchester Victoria train station

Peter faced two major challenges - boosting capacity for the Northern Hub ambition to double passenger numbers, and allowing for an expanding tram system too.

He said: “Those two things meant that the station as it was simply didn’t work - you couldn’t have kept stations working with those two things happening.”

It meant the old roof had to go to get rid of the arena staircase.

He added: “All those extra people would have been trying to get past that staircase so we had to get rid of it and make the decision to demolish a lot of the roof.

“In the end, there was basically a tiny part of the old station that physically works. You need space for the arena to work, enough room for train passengers and for tram passengers - those things are quite simple but it means that you have to demolish all the roof and you need a big roof to accommodate this.

“It was like snowball rolling down a hil.”

Oxford Road

Video Loading

Video Unavailable

Click to playTap to play

The video will start in 8Cancel

Play now

Pending a public inquiry in September, the Northern Hub will also mean big changes for Oxford Road Station.

Like Victoria, Oxford Road is a Grade II listed building. Small in scale, but a favourite among architects, it opened in 1960, and at the time was seen as a revolutionary building thanks to its cutting-edge timber structure.

It’s still a very distinctive building, and a ‘little gem’ in terms of heritage.

But it’s too small for the Northern Hub and our future transport needs. The platforms are crowded, the canopies insufficient and its footbridge too small.

Northern Hub: Oxford Road station - new footbridge and canopy

Often, the ticket gates are left open because of the sheer numbers of passengers.

It poses a challenge because the options for expansion are limited, but platforms need to be extended.

It means moving the walls on Whitworth Street West and - subject to public inquiry - improving the area at street level.

Plans for a new wall follow the historic vaults of the viaducts, creating a pedestrian link on a new pavement with a well-lit sheltered walkway linking the area to First Street and linking the station with Home. A new shopping arcade would line the way.

Ordsall Chord

The Ordsall Chord rail plan will link Victoria and Picadilly stations for the first time with a new rail bridge over the Irwell.

The plans include a new section of track to the north west of Castlefield Junction, in the vicinity of Ordsall.

This will link the Castlefield Junction line with the Deal Street Junction line, connecting Manchester’s three main stations for the very first time.

The benefits are to include two new fast trains per hour between Manchester Victoria and Liverpool.

It will also allow for six fast trains an hour between Leeds and Manchester - as opposed to the current four - plus faster journeys across the north,

There will also be a new direct service through Manchester city centre to Manchester Airport and quicker journeys to Hull, Newcastle and the North East.